Safari Is Not The Fastest Brower. By Far.

When Steve Jobs announced that Safari was the fastest browser on PCs and Macs, I thought, “When exactly did this crappy browser become the fastest?”

I then hunted down a press release at Apple’s site claiming Safari to be “the world’s fastest and easiest-to-use web browser for Windows PCs and Macs” along with a plethora of bogus benchmarks. “Fastest” and “easiest to use” is really stretching the truth. Peter-Paul Koch takes Apple to the task by examining Apple’s propagandistic assertion and concludes:

The “fastest browser on any platform” claim is based on faulty implementations of the Date object and the load event, and is therefore untrustworthy.

Read also an explanation by Mark “Tarquin” Wilton-Jones how incorrect timing of windows.onload skews the numbers. So Jobs’ claim is based on a Safari bug which he took for the ultimate truth. Nice! I wonder if we’ll see a press-release with a retraction. Probably not.

Inglorious legacy

Historically, Safari required a lot of arcane JavaScript and CSS tweaks. Of all browsers I get to deal with, Safari is the worst because of all the many inconsistencies. And “fastest”? Yeah, right. I make it a point to avoid running it on my iBook—it’s that slow. Firefox (along with other implementations riding on the lizard engine) and Opera perform much better.

Another thing I don’t get is why Apple ties Safari to specific Mac OS versions. I can’t upgrade Safari on Mac OS 10.3. It won’t let me. I have to upgrade the operating system for that!

Conclusion

I wouldn’t rush to install Safari just jet. After all these years it’s still the red-headed stepchild of browsers. I often poke fun at Opera, but I’d take Opera over Safari any day of the week.

I'm with you on all the above. At my job lately, I've had to make numerous little hacks to get Safari to render properly. IE6, IE7 and Firefox are working great, with no special tweaks. Ugh.

Also, G4 chips are waaaay faster than Intel's :)

> Of all browsers I get to deal with, Safari is the worst because of all the many inconsistencies.

Worse than Internet Explorer 6? Seriously?

Paul: yep, worse than IE6. At least IE is predictably capricious and its hacks are well known. :)

Right on, Milan. Safari certainly does suck. Being a javascript guru, it could not be more apparent for me. And I also agree your final comment about poking fun at Opera. Opera is pretty quirky sometimes with javascript (and there are certain things you just cant do, like programmatically select a range of text). But still, it blows Safari out of the water.

Sure, IE 6's failings have been very well documented.

I mostly write CSS, and I have much more work to do for IE than Safari. I don't do much with JavaScript, so I can't comment on Safari's limitations there.

Not my browser of choice but I have found especially on ajax rich sites that Opera is extremely fast especially when making concurrent requests to the server. Safari is very troublesome for any ajax speed optimizations in my experience.

You guys seem like gurus. Tell me what is the fastest and best browser available for windows and osx